Why Japanese Web Design Is So… Different

In the mind’s eye of many people, Japan is a land of tranquil Zen gardens, serene temples, and exquisite tea ceremonies. Both traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture, books and magazines are the envy of designers worldwide. Yet for some reason practically none of this mastery has been translated into digital products, in particular websites, most of which look like they hail from around 1998.

Linguistic Differences

Character Comfort – Logographic-based languages can contain a lot of meaning in just few characters. While these characters can look cluttered and confusing to the western eye, they actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space (the same goes for Chinese).

Lacking Emphasis – Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters which limits the opportunities for adding visual punch that you get with latin alphabets. This makes it more difficult to create the hierarchical contrasts required to organise information with type alone although many designers get around this by adding decoration or using graphic text.

Language Barrier – The web and most of the programming languages which drive it were designed by English speakers or western corporations and hence the majority of documentation and educational resources are also in English. Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted.

Cultural Differences

Risk Avoidance – In general Japanese culture does not encourage risk taking or standing out from the crowd. Once a precedent has been set for things looking or behaving a certain way then everybody follows it, regardless of whether there is a better solution. Even Japanese subcultures conform to their own fashions and rules.

Consumer Behaviour – People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here.

Advertising – Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a pamphlet rather than an interactive tool.

Urban Landscape – Walk around one of Tokyo’s main hubs like Shibuya and you’re constantly bombarded with bright neon advertisements, noisy pachinko parlours (game arcades), and crowds of rambunctious salary men or school kids. The same chaotic busyness of the streets seems to have spilled over to the web. Added to this, because physical space comes at a premium in Japan, none of it is wasted and the same goes for negative/white space on a webpage.

Job Roles – Look on any job site in Japan and you’ll still see adverts for roles like “Web Master” and “Web Admin” which hark back to the day when a company would employ a single IT guy to hand-code and run their entire website – many still do. On the other side of the equation, creative people want creative freedom which they’re not likely to find in a large Japanese corporation so they go elsewhere.

Technical Differences

Mobile Legacy – Japan was using their version of the mobile web on advanced flip phones long before the iPhone came along and in even larger numbers than had personal computers. Back then the screens were tiny and the way sites had to be designed to cram content into this small space has continued to influence the way things are now.

Web Fonts – There is a lack of web fonts for non-latin languages (Chinese, Japanese…). This is because each font requires thousands of characters to be individually designed which is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and would take longer to download. For these reasons designers tend to use graphics rather than plain text to display non-standard typefaces.

Windows XP & IE 6 – although the number of people using ancient Microsoft software is rapidly decreasing there are still a fair number of people using these dinosaurs, especially in corporate environments. Enough said.

Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980’s vision of the future and in many ways it’s this contradiction which characterises the design landscape in Japan. On one side we have enormous conglomerates churning out uninspiring mass-produced conformity while on the other side we see master craftspeople making things of incredible beauty and functionality.

On a more positive note, smaller design firms and companies like UNIQLO, MUJI, CookPad and Kinokuniya are proving that you can make aesthetically pleasing and functional websites in Japan. Let’s hope the rest learn from them and catch up soon.

Originally from the UK, David is designer and wanderer currently based in Tokyo. Prior to this, he lived in China and still returns frequently to continue exploring this vast and varied land. He started Randomwire in 2003 to chronicle his travels and occasional musings. Feel free to drop him a line.

I completely agree and understand what you are trying to say in this article. I myself is a Chinese-Canadian and I have learned web design program in Canada. But often when I look at those most popular websites in China, they are obviously using a very different layout system than any western countries, or countries that use latin language. And the most headache I had was, sometimes when i try to design website in Chinese, there no web font at all. Maybe there are some, but they use some js to make the browser preloads the font from the outsource web font server, and then cover all the text. This process creates a huge loading time and extra data transition before the actual web site could even open itself.

There are a lot of brilliant programmers and designers i have known in Asia, but I always wonder why this is still such a problem, even after the whole western world has already evolved to another level.

It’s not that surprising. Making web safe fonts for East Asian languages is an awful lot more expensive, probably more than fonts for Roman, Cyrillic and Greek fonts combined. Even for phonetic scripts like Hangul. Imagine trying to hint thousands of characters, that would be an absolute nightmare. Fortunately Google and Adobe have now given us the Noto font family.

I miss the days of functionality>layout. I just want to load a page, see everything right there and now, and I dont mean swiping and swiping myself to arthritis to view it all. Its as if every web page was designed for a phone. Nowadays I see this glaring empty space screaming at me on nearly all western sites, while taking up some 40% of my viewing real estate. I surely didnt pay for monitor upgrades all these years to… see LESS content that I could back when I was running on a 15″ monitor, than on my 27″. I do hope that at least, designers give the option to let the viewer choose the layout vs being forced to.

[…] Yeah! In Japanese, you can read top-down or right to left. I’m curious to see how websites are handling that as well. We read English; therefore, we see everything in the context of the English language (top to bottom, left to right). I’ll share with you a neat article I read, titled Why Japanese Design is So Different. […]

[…] Like these finches, many industries in Japan modified in unique ways. For example, Japan had phone cameras, email, and 3G years before the rest of the world. Nevertheless, it meant that the industry clung to flip-phone models, resisting smartphones until years after the West. This would have knock-on effects on related markets, like online shopping and web design. […]

Great article – and very useful. You have put into words a lot of things that I have felt or considered only on the level of impression.

Nowadays, I am writing my graduate dissertation and I need to include some insights on Japanese (in general, East-asian) website layouts. It is amazing how those are so similar across that area, yet so different from the rest of the online world.

Question is: do you maybe have some more sources on what you have written? Articles of any kind? Anything will be of great help:))

[…] Western eye, and even though there are technical, cultural and linguistic reasons underlying such bold Asian design, are evolving towards simpler aesthetics in a bid to become more accessible and usable. Asian […]

I think it all started with Yahoo!, companies copying Yahoo!’s design and from then on since higher-ranking old web designers/developers are in position it is hard for new talents to convince those on top to change the “usual” design. I think this is also cultural in a sense here in Japan. Although I just started a web design and online marketing company here in Nagoya, Japan called BraneBox http://branebox.com we would definitely try to convince our clients to go with the minimalist design because according to studies to many distractions would make it hard to convert those visitors.

I don’t want them to change follow what the west is doing. In fact I hate the modern web design. It’s bulky and annoying.

The modern websites have some big unnecessary image at the top and just one line. We have to scroll multiple time before we can see any actual content. Some of them even have video in the background. I want to see the actual contents with minimum scrolling. That’s why I prefer the old designs and wish that Asian sites don’t change.

In recent months I have complained to the communities behind various web-focused programming languages and tools about their lack of translations, outdated translations, and poor quality translations. Every response I received was overflowing with English language elitism. The common message I got back was “If you can’t speak English you can’t be a good developer.” What is most depressing is most of the messages were from people who did not have English as their first language. I could almost understand if it was only native English speakers saying this.